Archive for January 2009

I just wanted to drop a quick post here thanking everyone who took the time to come to our session this week while at ELI 2009! I think I can safely speak for my collaborators that we had a really good time working together and sharing our experiences with you all. Special thanks to Jim and Alan for being so easy and fun to work with!

At Penn State we’ve used Harvard’s Live Question Tool to help power and steer presentations quite a bit. The tool allows anyone in the audience with a web browser to post questions live while a presentation is going on. You can then vote on other questions to raise their potential value to the presenters. We’ll have an instance running during our talk on Tuesday and invite you to use that Internet connection for good by asking new questions and voting on others. If you are interested, you can add questions even before the session … I’ll also come back and answer any questions left after the session as well. Check it out and help steer the presentation!

I was doing a little research this morning for our presentation and I wandered into my delicious account for items tagged psublogging to see what I could find. I came across an article written in Penn State’s student newspaper, The Daily Collegian announcing the new service. It was published in August of 2007 right as we were giving away the first accounts in a very limited pilot. Funny that even back then we were talking openly about the fact that we were hoping students would use it for things other than blogging — I pointed her to a post I had made when we were working to convince our own administration that this is all about personal publishing, not just blogging. At one point while talking to the reporter I made the comment that I thought students could use them for taking notes in class and I recall her asking me to explain how that would work. It took her a few minutes, but all of a sudden she had the ah-ha moment that you could actually use this thing for anything. I thought it was a bit ironic given the online version of the Collegian uses the same system as the Blogs at Penn State is built on, Movable Type.

I’m looking forward to our Tuesday afternoon session at ELI. My colleagues Jim Groom and Cole Camplese have a carefully crafted plan for what we hope to be a very open discussion about the use of blogware or blog-like activities in higher education.

We will not mention the names of a few Canadians who left us short presenter-ed. Nope. We understand.

Our intention is to bring a few things from three very different experiences, and from three guys, who along with all having beards, also have been on the blog scene for a while. We are not here to talk about the virtues of blogging or not, nor to argue over platforms, but to look at the potential values of using said systems for much more than just posting personal updates.

So of course, it was appropriate that we set up our “presentation” or at least our media and resources, in a hosted blog environment. And apparently Cole was successful in squatting on a nice domain name 😉

Please use the comments here to fire back at us, whether you are in our session or not.

The presenters have evangelized open personalized publishing platforms and have struggled with establish closed environments as the basis for teaching and learning with technology. Their overall quest has led them to find powerful and flexible online publishing platforms. In a series of lightning talks, the presenters will share work at their respective organizations that they believe to be useful to others in the teaching and learning community. Each will select a project or problem that poses a significant challenge, which will then be discussed by all attendees.